Month: February 2015

Those of you who manage Exchange Database Availability Groups, particularly in Exchange 2013, will understand the frustration of coming to the office on a Monday morning to find that your Databases have migrated to A. N. Other server because of some scheduled backup or other task which occurred over the weekend.

To solve this problem, we can configure a Scheduled Task to run the RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script, which will balance your databases out based on the Activation Preference set for each server. Before you configure this task, make sure that your Activation Preference settings are applied as per your desired configuration.

For example, say I have a database named MBDB and two servers named Server1 and Server2 (I’m feeling particularly inventive today). To set the Activation Preference for these database copies, I would run the following Powershell command from EMS:

This configuration will mean that when I run the RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script, the MBDB database will be moved, if required, to Server1, as long as the required Database Mount Dial setting is achieved (the default setting is Best Availability which requires the Copy Queue Length to be no more than 12).

If I wanted to see how my database copies are currently configured, I would run the following Powershell command from EMS:

This would show me all the database copies and their Activation Preference. So we now have our settings configured and we want to setup our Scheduled Task. Open your Task Scheduler and create a new Basic Task. Give the task a name and configure your recurrence schedule for the Task. When you get to the Action menu, choose ‘Start a Program’.

Now we need to tell the task to:

1. Launch Powershell
2. Load the Exchange modules and connect to the Exchange server
3. Run the RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script with the correct switches
4. Supress the confirmation dialog which appears when running the script

Complete the task creation and then go into the properties of the task. On the General page, configure the task to:

1. Run whether the user is logged on or not
2. Run with highest privileges
3. If need be, change the account running the task to a service account of some kind. That account must be a member of the Organisation Management group

Just like this:

Your Scheduled Task is not configured. You can test it out by manually running it. Hopefully this solves a headache for one or two of you out there!

I just wanted to share this great article from EighTwOne on how to block the new Oulook app for iOS & Android. I don’t usually share other people’s posts but I thought this was particularly useful as there is quite a storm brewing in the proverbial teacup over this app. If you have concerns about the privacy and security of this app, use the commands listed in the linked article to create a device block or quarantine policy for the app.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the immediate availability the Outlook for iOS and Outlook for Android preview. These apps are the former app named Acompli, which was acquired by Microsoft in December, last year. It is unlikely that Microsoft will develop and support two similar apps, so one can assume the new Outlook app will replace the current OWA for iOS and OWA for Android (or just OWA for Devices) apps.

The app isn’t without a little controversy:

The app stores credentials in a cloud environment from Amazon Web Services for e-mail accounts that don’t support OAuth authorization.

The app makes use of a service sitting between the app and your mailbox. This service acts as a sort of proxy (hence it requires those credentials), fetching, (pre)processing and sending e-mail. In some way this is smart, as it makes the app less dependent on back-end peculiarities, using a uniform protocol to communicate…